“Her name is Justina,” I said. “Her brother Ben goes to your school. He’s got cystic fibrosis.”
“What’s cysta fi—”
“Cystic fibrosis,” Fadil finished for her. “It’s a genetic disorder that causes mucus in the lungs and makes it difficult to breathe, among other things.”
Sofie picked up one of her checkers and held it to her lips. “There’s a boy who carries a breather thing at my school, but he’s in Mr. Campbell’s class so I never talk to him.”
“That’s probably the same kid. And I’m not sure what I’m going to do.” I made Fadil turn his back while I changed. “You should have seen Justina’s face, all sad and hopeful at the same time. The most cold-hearted villain in the world would’ve struggled to say no to that girl.”
“I think you agreed to do it because you want to,” he said.
“Of course I want to—I’d be a horrible human being if I didn’t—but that doesn’t mean I should.”
“You’re afraid of who might disappear.”
I finished wriggling into my jeans and buttoned them. “You can turn around again.” I pulled a couple pairs of shoes out of the closet from under Conor’s box of LEGOs and decided to go with the red Converse. “Would you be Team Miracle if one of your parents got raptured, or is it only okay when it’s people you don’t know?”
Fadil sat frozen in the middle of a move, his checker dangling from his fingers.
“Are you going to make Daddy go away?” Sofie asked.
“Not today,” I said. “Why don’t you go find Conor and get your stuff together to stay with Mrs. Haimovitch?” Mama was working and Sean had informed me he was going out, so Mrs. Haimovitch had offered to watch Sofie and Conor. Since I’d healed her hip, she had so much energy. I’d even seen her jog-walking around the neighborhood.
When Sofie was out of the room, Fadil said, “I have to believe there’s a plan. Even when I don’t understand it.”
“How could I live with myself if you lost one of your parents?” I asked. “Or if I lost you or Mama? That’s the risk, right? The voices aren’t going to only take strangers and boys who try to shoot us. Eventually someone we know and care about is going to vanish, and that’ll be on me.”
“But if those people are being saved,” Fadil said, “if humanity is being saved, then the alternative is allowing everyone to die. I could live with losing my parents if it meant they were safe.”
Listen to Fadil, Baby Cthulhu said from under the bed. At least he’s not a total moron.
I ignored the stuffed deity. “It’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one in charge of the fate of the world. Anyway, does the world look like it’s ending? Things suck, yeah, but that’s nothing new. Things have always sucked for the majority of people, and the world hasn’t ended yet.”
“What do you want me to say, Elena? You heal people. You hear voices that are warning you the world is in danger.”
“Which is totally normal.”
Fadil clenched his fists and looked like he was two seconds from flipping the checkers board across the room. Then he took a deep breath. “Joan of Arc heard voices from God. Maybe you’re like her.”
My phone buzzed from the dresser and a message flashed on the screen. “It’s Javi,” I said. “He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Fadil swung his legs around and stood. “Then I’ll take off. But think about what I said, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “But you know they burned Joan of Arc at the stake, right?”
Fadil rested his hands on my shoulders. “If anyone tries to burn you at the stake, Elena, they’ll have to burn me with you.”
TWENTY-ONE
I GOT INTO Javi’s car, buckled my seat belt, turned to him, and said, “These are the rules: No touching. No trying to touch. We’re not going to have sex. You’re not going to make some awkward attempt to kiss me that I’m going to have to fend off. If you do, I’m going to slap you and you’re not going to act offended and claim I was giving you signs that I wanted it. There are no signs. There will be no signs. This will be our one and only date, and by the end of it you are going to tell me what your friends did to David Combs. Understand?”
Javi was wearing clean jeans and a nice plaid button-down shirt. Clearly he’d put some effort into his outfit, but he’d wasted it on me.
“Jesus, Elena. It’s a date, not an inquisition.”
“It’s not even really a date.”
Javi raised one eyebrow. “The deal was a date. If this isn’t a date, then I don’t have to tell you about Combs.”
I gritted my teeth. “Fine, it’s a date. Whatever.”
“Would it kill you to pretend to have fun?”
“Kill me? No. Turn my stomach and possibly make me vomit onto the floor of your sister’s car? Probably.”
Without another word, Javi put the car in drive and took off. Maybe it was a side effect of a mother who doted on him, or maybe he was born that way, but Javi was an eternal optimist when it came to dating. No matter how many times I told him no, he still believed he had a chance. Instead of moving on and finding a girl who was actually interested in him, he hung on to some small, misguided sliver of hope that he could change my mind and make me see that he was worthy of my time and affection. But there was nothing sexy about wearing me down. If Javi was honest with himself, he’d have realized I’d only gone out with him to get the information I wanted and so he’d quit asking.
“And for the record, Fadil is tracking my location on my phone in case you try anything sinister.”
“Sinister?” Javi said. “I’m not a comic book villain. This is a date. And I’m taking you somewhere awesome. I promise.”
I actually had activated the friend finder on my phone for Fadil, but not because of Javi. I’d done it after Carmen Ballard, attorney to the anonymous creeper, had shown up at my house, so that if I ever vanished Fadil could find me.
“How’s Izzy?” I asked. “And how’d you convince her to let you borrow her car?”
“She offered when I told her I was taking you out.”
“You told her we weren’t getting back together, right?”
Javi stopped at a red light and glanced at me. “She said you’d be stupid not to give me another chance.”
“But did she really?”
Javi shook his head. “No. She actually said you’d be stupid to give me another chance. She also says hi.”
I liked Javi’s sister. She was in college and smart and I should have dated her instead of Javi.
“So how’re you holding up?” Javi asked. “I’m sure things are kind of crazy for you, what with you performing miracles and shit.”
“Mrs. Haimovitch fed pot brownies to a reporter who’d come around asking questions.”
“Nice.”
“We’ve gotten some hate mail, and someone keeps tagging my locker with ‘slut,’ among other things.”
Javi held up one hand but kept his eyes on the road. “Totally not me.”
“But you know who’s doing it.”
“Possibly,” he said.
“Whatever. I changed lockers, so now they’re defacing an empty one.”
I tried to guess where Javi was taking me based on the direction we were driving, but we were heading north on I-95, which made our destination difficult to predict. Previously, Javi’s attempts to take me on dates had included movies, mini golf, and parking at the beach. The beach was east, mini golf in the opposite direction, and we wouldn’t have needed to get on the interstate to go to a movie, so I assumed he was taking me somewhere new. I prayed it was a place with crowds and bright lights. It was easier to fend off Javi’s roving hands if I could see them properly.
“What was it like?” he asked. “Healing Freddie, I mean.”
“Bloody.”
“Did you see Freddie’s memories or form a psychic bond with her?”
“No.” I would have been content to sit in the car in silence until we reached our destination, but Javi was going to continue pe
stering me if I didn’t offer him more than one-word answers. “It was freaky. I closed my eyes, but I could still see her, only it wasn’t her. She was made of light, and there was this black hole where she’d been shot. And I made it go away. I don’t know how to describe it.”
Javi bobbed his head. “I read this book about the multiverse. It was fiction, but the science was based on the real theory that every time we make a choice, the universe branches off, with the choices we didn’t make forming new universes and shit.”
I’d seen enough sci-fi movies to be familiar with the concept. “So there’s a world in which I didn’t agree to go on this date?”
“And one where we didn’t break up.”
“How about one where we didn’t elect a narcissistic reality-TV personality to be president?”
“God, I hope we got that shit right in at least one universe.”
I laughed in spite of myself; I didn’t want Javi to think we were having a good time. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll play along. Are you trying to say you think I’m—what?—healing people in other universes?”
“Hell if I know.” Javi took an exit in Port Saint Lucie and headed east. “But the power to heal Freddie came from somewhere. Why not an alternate dimension? In comic books, healers sometimes draw the wound into themselves.”
“I definitely didn’t do that.”
“So where’d the power come from?”
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t have a lot of answers. The power to heal could have been given to me by the voices or it could have been part of me all along and the voices simply helped me learn to use it.
“Of course,” Javi said, “it might have come from God.”
“So I’m Saint Elena now?”
Javi grinned, and it was cute, but as soon as the thought surfaced, I mentally slapped myself back to reality. Javi wasn’t cute. He wasn’t charming. The moment he sensed weakness, he’d try to get into my pants. “You’re no saint, but that doesn’t mean God can’t still be involved.”
“Do you really believe in God?”
“Five years of Catholic school.”
“But you don’t believe the earth was created in seven days or that humans rode dinosaurs to work, right?”
“That’s messed up, Elena. Going to church doesn’t make you an idiot.” He gave me a sour look. “Science and God aren’t mutually exclusive.”
In a million years I never would have guessed I’d be enduring a lecture about religion from my ex-boyfriend on the way to our mystery date-not-date.
“You sound like Fadil,” I said, not wanting to argue.
“How is Fadil? Still playing his trumpet solo?” He laughed at his own joke. I did not.
“Actually, I think he’s hooking up with Naomi Brewer.”
“Huh,” Javi said. “How’re you handling that?”
“Me? Why would I care?”
“Don’t play like you don’t keep Fadil around as your safety boyfriend.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
Javi’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “It’s the sweet loser guy you keep around, stringing him along so that if you wind up alone you have a boyfriend ready to fall back on.”
“First of all, I don’t have those feelings for Fadil. Second, he doesn’t have them for me. Third, not everyone is you, Javi. It is possible for boys and girls to be friends without it being about sex.”
“If you say so.”
I let the conversation die as we drove to our destination. I still had no idea where we were going, and was confused when we finally pulled into the parking lot of a botanical garden. Of all the places I would have expected Javi to take me, this hadn’t even made the list.
“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” Javi said. “It’s okay, you can admit it. I won’t gloat too much.”
“And here I’d almost forgotten how charming you could be.” There’s no way he missed my sarcasm, but I was surprised. “You asked Izzy for suggestions, didn’t you?”
Javi wriggled his shoulders with pride. “I came up with this idea all on my own.”
Surprise number two.
We walked through the gift shop, which was full of kitschy Florida crap—flamingo key chains and palm tree T-shirts—and Javi paid for us to get in. The woman behind the register gave us a suspicious look because she probably didn’t see many high school kids in the botanical garden on a Friday night. Then we started walking aimlessly. I didn’t know much about flowers or plants, but they were pretty to look at and their myriad scents filled the air with ginger and jasmine and smells I couldn’t identify. We strolled along, admiring the beauty under the starlit sky. It was muggy and mosquitoes roamed the night in vicious swarms, but if I ignored them it was almost wonderful.
We stopped in a section devoted to bonsai trees. It was walled off from the rest of the garden, with koi ponds that burbled and decorative plaques and informational signs over each tree. I sat on a bench and watched the enormous fish swim to the surface.
“These things are unnerving,” I said.
“Koi?”
“They belong in a bad B movie. Koimageddon! Or Attack of the Giant Goldfish! ”
“You know they’re not the same thing, right?” Javi said. “Goldfish and koi?”
“Really?”
“Koi can cost thousands of dollars, but you can’t give goldfish away.”
“They’re still creepy.”
“Definitely.”
Javi had opted not to sit with me, instead roving around the pond, reading each of the signs over the bonsai. To his credit, he hadn’t tried to hold my hand or give me one of those longing glances that told me he was thinking about trying to kiss me or was picturing me naked. I mean, he didn’t deserve that much credit for basically acting like a normal human being, but some was warranted.
“You ready to tell me about David Combs?” I asked.
“Answer me one question first.”
“That wasn’t the deal.”
“Don’t be like that, Elena.”
“Fine.”
Javi turned to face me. He kept his hands behind his back. The light framed his broad shoulders and mischievous dimpled cheeks. If I hadn’t known what an asshole he could be, I might have been incredibly attracted to him.
“Why’d we break up?”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “That was last year, Javi. Get over it.”
“I’m serious. Out of the blue you ghosted me and I didn’t even know something was wrong until our relationship was over. I kind of feel like I deserve an explanation.”
What Javi thought he deserved and what he actually deserved were two different things, but this was the price I had to pay, and if he wanted to wade into the septic tank of our dead relationship, I could play.
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Want?” he asked. “No. Need? Yes.”
I sighed and rubbed my hands on my jeans. This wasn’t a conversation I’d expected to be having, so I was unprepared. “All you thought about was sex. We’d barely been dating for two months, and it was like I’d become nothing but a sex doll to you.”
“That’s not true!”
“And you couldn’t say ‘vagina’ without giggling. If you can’t say it, you don’t get to go near it.” Even though we’d been broken up for a while, all the old resentments flooded back. “It’s a word! You come out of them, you come in them, but I say it and you get all giggly and stupid.”
Javi’s face and ears were turning pink. “It’s funny!”
“It’s really not. But it proves how immature you are that you think it is.” Maybe yelling at Javi wasn’t the best way to put him in the appropriate mood for telling me about David Combs, but he’d asked and I felt obligated to tell him the truth. “It was more than that, though. You asked me out when you were still new to Arcadia West. You treated me like a normal human being. And then you met Adam and Clay and Ram, and suddenly I was nothing but some girl you were banging, even though we
weren’t banging.”
“You know how guys are.” Javi’s voice had risen an octave.
“Not the kind of guy I wanted to date.”
Javi’s shoulders slumped. He sat down on the bench beside me, wise enough to leave space between us. “I get stupid around the boys.”
“And I might have been able to deal with that, but then you called me Mary.”
“I never did that.”
“I was waiting outside of Mr. Greene’s class because we were supposed to go to my house to study. You walked by with Adam, nodded in my direction, and said, ‘Sorry, Mary. Rain check on tonight?’ Then you and ‘the boys’ laughed your asses off and left. That’s the moment I knew we were over.”
Javi screwed up his face like he was trying to recall that day but couldn’t. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t remember that.”
“Well, it happened.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want your apology. I get it. I’m the school freak. I’m the girl whose mother was a virgin when she was born. Which, by the way, calling me Mary doesn’t make any sense since Mary was the virgin and I was the one born of a virgin.”
“You’re not a freak,” Javi said.
“No, I am. It’s okay. In our school hierarchy, I’m barely a rung above the kid who eats paste. And it’s fine. I’ve accepted that.” I took a breath and went on. “But for a few weeks, despite the pressure you put on me to sleep with you, I thought you saw me as more than that. When I realized you didn’t, I knew we were through.”
I sat quietly and waited for Javi to protest that he hadn’t meant to hurt me and that he’d only been joking—because saying he’s only joking is how every dick defends being a dick—but he didn’t argue or attempt to defend himself.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Okay.”
Javi turned to me and caught my eyes. “No, really. I’m sorry.”
“I accept your apology,” I said. “We’re still not getting back together.”
“I wouldn’t take me back either if I were you.” He hung his head. “Why didn’t you tell me I was such an asshole?”
“You wouldn’t have heard me.”
“Probably not.”